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 her being the best of company, when she was in the very thick of it. But if she happened to have a taste for writing she might take a fancy to put on paper what wild horses would not have dragged from her lips; and once having written such poetry as hers, she would have been more or less than human if she could have kept it to herself."

"Tcan fancy just what kind of a girl she is," John told me one day. "She is probably rather plain, but with a good deal of brilliancy of expression and a touch of cynicism in her face and in her talk. A flattering manner, I should say, but with the heart a little gone out of it. Just a little. Everybody wouldn't notice it."

"Only it couldn't escape a student of human nature like you, Jack."

"Nor a master of satire like you, Francis. No, we should not be deceived."

And John pursued the correspondence with unabated vigor.